


The Cobra Effect

by xMidnightSun



Category: Original Work
Genre: Descent into Madness, F/M, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:32:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xMidnightSun/pseuds/xMidnightSun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes trying to solve a problem only improves it temporarily before making it even worse than before. Elias experiences this firsthand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cobra Effect

They say that when a vampire reaches 1,000 years of age, he or she is faced with one final challenge before the threat of insanity, of losing themselves to the mindless monsters that their species naturally _was_ , finally passes and they are allowed to live, some say, for the rest of eternity. Very few vampires pass this final trial; many a time, Elias had found himself faced with a monster much like himself, a poor soul who'd lost the fight against the insanity and allowed themselves to be swallowed up by their horrible nature.

Elias had been born in 1065. He was 948 years old. That meant he had only 52 years left before his trial, which, though it may seem a long time to mortals, was frighteningly near, and closing in quickly.

He'd already begun to feel the horrible effects of his trial, much earlier than other, normal blood-drinkers. Dumitru claimed this was the fault of his maker, a crazy old man Elias had long since forgotten, only occasionally spotting him in the horrific nightmares which now plagued him when he slept.

He didn't sleep much anymore.

Everyone had commented on his behavior. He'd noticed several times that Amadea would gather with Sindri and Fridtjof, and on occasion Dumitru, and they'd have whispered conversations just outside of his hearing, looking back at him every now and then with strange looks which instantly ignited a burning rage in his chest and practically forced him to snarl threats at them and stalk over to break up their little congregation, scattering them like fish fled before a prowling shark. Occasionally he caught snippets of their conversation when he sneaked up while they were unaware, and, little by little, he became aware that they thought of him as insane. He'd disregarded the notion almost immediately for a very long time, vehemently (and violently) defending himself any time he caught them talking about him, which was fairly often.

However, these past few months, he'd come to realize through the fog in his mind that something was _wrong_. And when he became aware of it, the realization hit him like a punch to the stomach, and he very quickly came to recognize just how fragmented his mind had become, though he hadn't realized it even as he'd prowled the streets, taking delight in the fear of his prey as he ever so quietly chased them down, allowing them only a glimpse of him in the shadows before vanishing again and relishing in their pure terror, the kill very like a drug to his broken mind.

The moment he realized this, he panicked.

He'd woken Fridtjof up in the middle of the night, begged him for help. "You know healers," he'd said, "the healers can help me, can't they?" And he'd bullied his only friend into taking him to Hell, to a healer with surprising medical prowess.

Still he saw the horrifying image of just what his age had done to his brain in his nightmares.

By the time he'd left Hell, he was a completely different man. Where he had once been violent, unstable, a fuse lit from both ends, he became calm, almost docile, and for the first time in a very long time, he felt at peace.

Kyra and Amadea had been shocked by the change, but Amadea had adjusted very quickly and had fallen in love with him all over again. Kyra still seemed uncomfortable with him, avoiding him frequently despite his best attempts to bond with her again. But he wasn't angered by this like he would have been; rather, he cheerfully accepted it, telling himself she'd come to terms with the fact that he'd changed and they'd have a good relationship again.

She never got the chance.

Everything was wonderful for a few months. And then Elias started to notice something different: he'd begun to hear things. At first, it was barely noticeable, a wordless murmur that he sometimes didn't even notice, or hearing his name whispered when there was no one around him. He disregarded it at first, passing it off as a remnant of his former shattered mind.

And then it got worse.

Around six months after the operation, he began to see shadows out of the corner of his eye that vanished when he turned to look, heard voices calling his name clear as day, and the whispering became increasingly louder, what was once a wordless noise quickly forming coherent words and stringing together sentences which chilled him to the bone.

_"It's your fault."_

_"Why?"_

_"You did this."_

He didn't understand what he was hearing, no matter how hard he searched his memory. None of the names he heard matched the names from his past, and he couldn't communicate with the voices; they simply talked over him, their voices growing louder and louder until he surrendered, and even then, they wouldn't stop talking until he sank his fangs into someone, something, as the act of feeding for some reason drove them away.

He attributed these voices and shadows to his age and foolishly disregarded them once more.

Within the next few weeks, the voices grew louder, crying and screaming deafening threats, pleas, accusations, until his ears rang, and the shadows in the corners of his vision quickly turned into shadowy beings standing in silence until he blinked before vanishing into thin air. He was plagued by a constant sense of dread, of fear, no matter where he went, and every time he turned his head, he'd spot a shadow, a face, a human form that would linger for only seconds before vanishing again, leaving behind only a dreadful weight in his gut and a buzzing static in his ears, the voices crying louder than ever.

He began to withdraw once more, this time out of fear, not of disdain for humanity. What was once a cold, empty excuse for a bedroom became a refuge, the one place left that the voices and faces and shapes and shadows didn't violate. Amadea quickly noticed, and was alarmed to realize, that he'd stopped feeding as frequently as should have been necessary for a vampire as old as he, and though she tried her hardest to draw Elias back into the world, he began to withdraw from her as well, so much so that she even found herself becoming secluded, hiding away from her friends and family and associates as she desperately tried to coax Elias from the bedroom in which he'd finally chosen to lock himself, undeterred by a severe lack of success. In fact, her resolve only strengthened when she began to hear him begging the voices and shadows and faces to leave him alone, hearing him cry late at night when he thought she was asleep, pleading for the torture to end.

She didn't tell Fridtjof about Elias's condition. She didn't have the heart to tell him that his oldest friend (that she knew of at least) was very quickly, much more quickly than before, losing his connection to the real world.

In the end, she didn't have to mention a thing to him. Elias stayed locked away for almost a year; his absence was noticed by anyone who knew him, particularly Fridtjof and his family, and questions began to pour in. She couldn't answer the questions alone, she needed Elias with her to answer, and she _needed_ to draw him out of the room, even if it meant breaking down the door, because she _knew_ he needed her, and he needed Fridtjof and the others, even if he wouldn't admit it. So, finally, she made the decision to forcibly drag him out.

It took a while, but after several tries, she managed to break the door down, realizing once she was through that she hadn't been able to open the door because Elias had somehow, even in his weakened state, managed to push the dresser in front of the door, and had built himself a small fortress out of blankets and pillows and chairs in the closet, where she found him, curled up in a pale little ball, surrounded by the corpses of small animals he'd somehow trapped through the window and subsisted off of while he'd been hiding away.

She hadn't even managed to say his name before she found herself cradling him, holding his nearly-skeletal body against her own, wrapping around him in a desperate, and vain, attempt to warm him, keep him there, keep him awake and with her. He couldn't even lift his head; months of living only off of the small mammals he'd scrounged up had drained him of all but what he absolutely needed to remain 'alive', leaving him with atrophied muscles, his bones pressing out against his skin as though they were on the verge of breaking through, and perhaps they were; his body had always been strange, especially since he'd been turned in the middle of adolescence, and his body had completed the cycle without growing even an inch, giving him a permanently shrunken, malnourished appearance which was only made worse by lack of nutrients.

Before she even realized it, she'd begun to cry, cradling his frail body close and gently rocking back and forth. Whether or not he even realized she was there, she had no idea, at least until she felt him press against her, making a weak little sound she could only guess was supposed to be a sound of recognition, or perhaps thanks, or maybe it was an apologetic sound; whatever it was, the meaning was lost and she only held him closer and cried harder.

She remained where she was, doing what she was doing, for a long time. It may have been an hour, or only ten minutes, or maybe even a day; all she knew was, by the time she'd finally managed to stop crying, her tears had long since run dry and her sobs were little more than dry heaves that made her throat and chest ache even more than her heart, if that was possible. Elias hadn't moved except to rest a hand against her cheek, but he hadn't even been able to raise his arm and had only moved it an inch or so before it had fallen, uselessly, to his side. She managed a weak little sniffle through the violent dry sobs tearing through her, lowering her head to touch her nose to his forehead, and when she found herself able to calm down even the slightest, she moved to place Elias's mouth against her throat, desperately trying to get him to bite, to give him the blood he so desperately needed, and only found her despair renewed when he cringed and tilted his head slightly away, though she could tell he wanted to move very far away.

And it was then that she understood, and that only made things worse, tears filling her eyes and distorting her vision once more as new, horrible wails tore from her throat, the sound just as a mourning wolf in the wilderness who had just lost her mate.

 

 

When Kyra found them the next morning, she found only her mother curled mutely against the wall in the closet, her glazed-over eyes locked on a mess of ash lying before her and covering her front and arms and legs, unresponsive. Fridtjof eventually arrived to help her carry her to the hospital, where, only a few days later, she passed as well. Her official cause of death, according to the coroner?

"Death by broken heart."


End file.
